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Saturday 12 September 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 7 September 2026
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Beetlestone, Susan
(? - ) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Face Lift" in Interzone for November/December 1988; the Satirical approach to Near Future issues of Identity in this tale has, variously expressed, governed the remainder of her work, through which can also be seen an informed interest in ...
Caine, Peter
Pseudonym of US author Doug Hornig (1943- ), author of several crime thrillers under that name, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Game of Magical Death" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for March 1987. His one title as by Caine, Virus (1989), is a Near Future medical sf (see Medicine) thriller about a radical plot to infect the world ...
Bi'en Fū
Pseudonym of Princess Fukuko Asaka (1941-2009) a Japanese sf author better known as the second cousin of Emperor Hirohito. A great grand-daughter of the same Meiji Emperor whose restoration ushered in Japan's modern era, Asaka lost her title during a 1947 pruning of the imperial family tree conducted by US Occupation authorities. Her pseudonym Bi'en Fū (literally: "Beauty Garden") was used in several stories printed in Takumi ...
Buckley, Christopher
(1952- ) US author – son of William F Buckley Jr (1925-2008), himself the author of some fantasy but not sf – whose novels have been Satires of contemporary American life which sometimes edge towards the fantastic. Typical of these is Little Green Man (1999), in which the media pundit protagonist believes he has been abducted by Aliens but has in fact been abducted by a government agency, so ...
Pattison, Eliot
(1951- ) US author most of whose fiction consists of thrillers in the Inspector Shan sequence. Ashes of Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America (2011), is set in a Post-Holocaust America twenty-five years after the country has been devastated by international terrorism. An original founder of the village of Carthage – now a harsh pocket Dystopia in which knowledge of the ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star ...